Rest day run-down
July 18, 2008
What do you do on a non-rayce day? Not set the alarm for 5am……anyone who knows me, knows that I am not ‘little mary sunshine’ in the morning and these early wakeup calls have been a killer!!! …..(I can hear sniggers from certain of my loved ones!).
Three of the team weren’t so lucky yesterday as they had to go to Falls Park to get the batteries out of
Sightseeing: The falls on the Big Sioux River in Falls Park, where the race was based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. the impound and to start charging the array. With a threatening thundershower, the organizers shut everyone down around 8am as the storm broke and dumped buckets of water on the city. For those of us not on array duty, we didn’t wake up until 7:15 which seemed like a long lie-in compared to rayce days. After breakfast everyone headed off to catch up on whatever they needed – some went to Barnes and Noble, others to the mall and I gathered up several bags of laundry and headed to the local Laundromat for two hours of watching a bizarre show about Oregon woodsmen competing over who can chop down the most number of trees in a single season (daytime TV is quite weird) while six machines washed and dried team clothes.
After lunch, the team went back to Falls Park where all of the teams were expected to be present to meet the public and await the lagging teams. Not everyone was able to finish yesterday but by 3:30pm (closing time for this stop) all of the teams were in the compound. Durham arrived with their car on a trailer having driven it all the way from Omaha, but they were upbeat as they had completed all of the stage from Neosho to Omaha Nebraska under solar power. They made the Omaha stop 2 ½ minutes after it closed…..and decided to hoof it today with the car on the trailer. One advantage that they have is that their trailer is just a flat bed and as such, they charged their batteries all the way to Sioux Falls.
Keepsake: The team made a souvenier by signing the back of set of broken solar cells.
I spent the afternoon logging 68 receipts to a spreadsheet - $4,213.62 worth of food, gas, meals and accommodation!
Today we are back into rayce mode and off to Fargo, North Dakota
- Lynne Cowe Falls, faculty advisor